Doing our first Advancement next session, so I've been looking over Schticks.
I noticed tonight that "Beard of the Dragon" (page 140) and "Mesmerizing Dart" (page 145) have some loopholes that probably need shoring up with house-rules or errata.
Bearded Dragon:
Spend 1 Chi and 1 shot. Until the end of the fight, targets of your failed attacks nonetheless take 3 Wound Points per attack.
Mesmerizing Dart:
Spend 1 Chi and 1 shot. Until the next keyframe, every time you attack an opponent they lose 1 shot, regardless of whether your attack hits or misses.
- Neither specifies that they only affect Martial Arts attacks, or close combat attacks. So you could pair them with a ranged weapon. (In fact, players are likely to assume "Dart" to means it is intended to work at range: the other power with "Dart" in the name from the same Path specifically uses throwing weapons.)
- A PC with either of these abilities could therefore choose to use the rules for hitting multiple opponents to target literally every GMC in the scene. The fact that you'd almost certainly miss on the attack against all those targets doesn't really matter. Both of these schticks specifically work when you fail, so you might as well go for the highest difficulty number.
- In the case of Beard of the Dragon, 3 Wound Points reads like it might be an auto-kill on every single Mook in the scene. If it came up at my table, I'd argue that it doesn't count as a hit, and Mooks drop on being hit, not on taking damage... but that means this schtick is useless against Mooks, which isn't necessarily what someone would assume from a first glance.